Our current individual role for the nation is not drowning in dependency or lamentations

By Surya Vishwa

Let each of us beginning today take action towards individual and national food security.

Let us nutritionalise the soil with our kitchen refuse. 

Let us envisage through action an entire population cultivating their own food in whatever when they can, wherever they can.

Let us practically each day start creating our national agrarian policy towards food security and sustainability.

Let us be the system changers and not mere system protesters. 

The currently new Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe last week sounded the alarm that Sri Lanka will face a food crisis from around August this year to March 2023. 

In a nation languishing in queues this may seem like the final straw but before we succumb to depression and allow the refrain we constantly hear that the lack of chemical fertiliser is the cause of this food crisis, let us please bear in mind that we are a nation which until a few decades ago and the brainwashing and soil destruction therein, was historically an agrarian nation. 

In actuality we have been having a food crisis from the time we had policies brought to import essential foods that are easily cultivable in this agrarian land. 

Until colonisation and the neo colonisation through which the route of science was used for diverse dubious purposes centred upon global profit making cleverly interspersed with the imperialist business of modern education resulting in agrarian nations duped to destroying their own agrarian identity and believing their nature based traditional agriculture methods were inferior, we are today faced with large acreages of destroyed soil which cannot be rectified overnight. 

Thus, regardless of the knowledge or ignorance or apathy of policymakers the people of the nation must educate themselves on a few points that concern basic common sense.

If it took Sri Lankans and our soil some decades to be addicted to chemical fertiliser then it would require an almost equal number or decades to systematically plan for regaining our confidence in agrarian heritage.

This cannot be done if we constantly allow ourselves a psyche of thinking that our solution is forever seeking expertise or food or aid or loans or grants from some other nation or organisation. 

The realisation that Sri Lanka was highly populated for much of its civilisation spanning thousands of years makes a joke of the modern argument that we need to spend our dollars on chemical agriculture because we need to feed our citizens. 

For almost the entire post-independence, we have been squandering our dollars importing potatoes and onions and other produce ignoring that these grow in abundance here to the point we could even export.

We have forgotten true statesmen such as Dr. N.M. Perera when as Minister of Finance in the 1970s took practical steps to reverse the idiocy of agricultural imports by mobilising government action to boost mass cultivation of everyday traditional food of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka’s descent to the current state of things is the slow death that happens when a nation develops the pandemic of dependency. Continuing to run with the begging bowl to the world will not save us.

The only thing that will save us now is our own action – the action of each and every one of us which equals our entire population. Whether our 225 policymakers act or not we have to once and for all realise that the word ‘government’ is made up of the people. The people are the actual government as we are the ones who elect certain persons to the temporary positions of caretakers of the land that belongs to the people; a nation. 

While protesting is a right of the people, we have to educate ourselves and the future generations that every one of us who are protesting, have to ask ourselves what we have done in the past or present towards our country (other than protesting). 

This nation belongs to the people and to reverse the food shortage that Ranil Wickremesinghe has kindly warned us about is primarily upto us. Whether 225 members of parliament remember their national agrarian heritage or not, we cannot allow ourselves this amnesia. 

Right now it will be lethal if we allow ourselves to get into the trap of thinking our food shortages can be solved by other nations dropping us food from the sky. We have to get down to earth and start salvaging any last shred of the self respect our ancient monarchs so carefully built for this country and start researching the wealth of traditional food varieties that grow on this soil. The importance of traditional food varieties (deshiya beeja) is that it is born out of a particular soil and withstands its nature and is often very robust. Within the 74 years of post-independent timeframe we have indulged as part of our agricultural policy in destroying much of these traditional crops, especially some of the rice varieties that do not require the usual conditions for paddy and grow on hard and saline soil.

In a conversation last week with one of the agrarian land officers who had worked closely with Dr. N.M. Perera, this writer was reminded by this official not to fall for the fallacy that people will starve in this nation.

As he rightly explained, we will only starve if we continue to allow various persons, in whatever position, for whatever reason, to make us slaves to the thinking that our solutions should come from elsewhere and not from within us. This is what has got us into this debt crisis and it is time we redeem ourselves, first from within the realm of our mind. 

Our post-colonial so-called independence has been rigged with dependency which has made our diplomacy a begging bowl shame and our development policies a vacuum devoid of common sense. This is why we are saddled with loans for projects that are a mere liability. However, let us not indulge in the past time of blame, however tempting it is, but take the reins of action towards this land and its sacred soil that have nurtured our forefathers and who nurtured it in return. 

Let us reiterate. To drown in self pity or complaining or to be caught in the world wind of protests while waiting to die of famine is not what a wise citizenry should do.

Instead we should seek out the many Sri Lankans who are waging their solutions to the food crisis in many ways, often silently and amidst much hardship.

Despite a mass media that largely knows only to bring bad news and not take action to avert it by motivating and educating people towards wise action there are citizens who are trying to save the nation from needless beggarism.

Here are a few examples, some of which this page has featured. 

Prasad Harendra Kumara from the village of Thithawelpatha in Uda Walawe who singlehandedly created a wewa to collect rainwater and enable water supply to the cultivation of many crops that include plantains and water melons cultivating in less than three acres. In his own words, “There is no lucrative way of making a living as farming.” A development officer at the Godakawela Pradeshiya Sabhawa, Prasad who has several university qualifications, including an MA in Mass Communication is a youth who has shown the way for the young generation of Sri Lanka. We will be publishing his story in detail in the coming weeks. Suranga Lakshan Kariyawasam from the village of Manana in Horawala, Welithenna, around five kilometres from Mathugama cultivates traditional paddy varieties organically and rare medical and heritage food crops in his native place as well as supervises and supports the cultivation of 48 acres by a hotel management in the Hambantota area. Suranga, an international chef by profession has pioneered the consciousness of the agrarian entrepreneurial link between the plate, the earth and health. He functions as an educator of young people on the health and medicinal based food cultivation and recipe creation. This page featured Suranga’s efforts towards food sufficiency in Sri Lanka last year.

Ranjit Seveniratne, the 86-year-old youth, who was among the pioneers of the Lankan organic resurrection in the 1980s who regularly writes for this page about his experiences in consuming his own food cultivated in a forest garden in the heart of Colombo. 

Carpenter turned farmer, 65-year-young Sarath Premathilaka of Palledelthota, Galaha, Kandy, who cultivates indigenous plant varieties of Sri Lanka, including a vast range of traditional potatoes was featured in this page this year and we will continue to obtain his advice on a people initiated national food security policy that each of us can bring to fruition from this moment onwards. 

The Hela Suwaya indigenous Naadi wedakam dedicated centre in Malabe that uses as its cures the consumption of produce cultivated on healed soil, with the premise that the soil is another organism such as the human organism and that the same care and nutrition that a human being requires, the soil also needs and thus, what is borne out of a healthy soil, cannot produce sick humans (that will benefit the modern medical industry) but will produce healthy individuals and even heal sicknesses. The Hela Suwaya organisation has up to now cultivated thousands of acres in Sri Lanka using the Govithenata Aushada concept. This page has featured this concept and the work of Hela Suwaya.

Internationally renowned ecologist, Dr. Ranil Senenayake who in the 1970s protested against the policy decision to succumb to foreign and advice to grow pine trees on Lankan mountain tops which had been destroyed by tea cultivation and thereby de-forested and much of the land abandoned, left his job as adviser to the Mahaweli Ministry, sold his house and bought a land to experiment with his concept of analog foresting. Today, except Sri Lanka, around 30 nations have used his concept into policy actions and he continues his work for his country Sri Lanka through the Belipola Arboretum combining concepts of tourism with climate change action, forestry and food security. The Weekend FT Harmony Page and the Daily FT main pages have repeatedly featured Dr. Ranil Senanayake and will continue to do so as we take part as well as initiate action towards food security in Sri Lanka.  

The Sinhala Weda Uruma Baraya consisting of traditional physicians of Sri Lanka and scholars as well as agrarian practitioners who took action to prevent the squandering of dollars during the COVID pandemic by promoting the thousands of Lankan indigenous physicians who were researching and treating the different strains of the virus and even exporting the medicines. Currently the Sinhala Weda Uruma Baraya is conceptualising a framework for health and medicinal sustainability in this current crisis by educating Sri Lankans that for every modern disease that we have come to believe can be controlled only by Western medical science, can be fully cured (nittawata suwa kireema) through traditional medicine. The Sinhala Weda Uruma Baraya is currently working on setting up a framework for educating national media on medicinal sustainability in the nation and the link with dollar conservation.

There are hundreds of persons around Sri Lanka who are doing similar service to their nation as mentioned above and the Daily FT as well as the Weekend FT Harmony Page will continue to seek them out so that they could help our nation and its people in this crucial moment of manmade crisis. 

(Please send your comments to [email protected].)